How do judges of the Supreme Court of Oklahoma reach the bench?

The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.

Supreme Court of Oklahoma / Joined 1947 / Served to 1965

Napoleon Bonaparte Johnson

Justice, Supreme Court of Oklahoma

Napoleon Bonaparte Johnson was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Oklahoma, who joined the court in 1947. Opinions & record ↓ Sources ↓

Born: 1891 · age 135
Tenure: 1947–1965 · 18 yrs

Judicial service

Year	Court	Appointed by	Vote
1947	Supreme Court of Oklahoma	–	–

Education

Rogers State University
Samford University

Judicial Record

In our data, Johnson authored 717 published opinions for the court (1916–1965), plus 11 dissents and 1 concurrence. Most cited: City of Tulsa v. Wells (60 citations).

Published, precedential opinions from the CourtListener corpus. Counts and rankings are objective and recomputable: how we count. We describe the record, not the judge. 179 of these were attributed to Johnson by a unique court-, date-, and surname-match against our roster (marked ), because CourtListener recorded no author for them. Each links to the official text to verify. How we match.

Selected opinions

Year	Case	Citation	Cited
1920	City of Tulsa v. Wells	191 P. 186	60
1953	Jones v. Eppler	266 P.2d 451	54
1959	Mistletoe Express Service, Inc. v. Culp	353 P.2d 9	53
1952	Choctaw County v. Bateman	252 P.2d 465	50
1919	Blevins v. W. A. Graham Co.	182 P. 247	50
1950	Al's Auto Sales v. Moskowitz	224 P.2d 588	49
1922	Hudgens v. State Ex Rel. Mills, Co. Attorney	204 P. 284	49
1922	Ohio Drilling Co. v. State Industrial Commission	207 P. 314	47
1922	Hogan v. State Industrial Commission	207 P. 303	46
1921	Williams v. City of Norman	205 P. 144	43
1958	Cities Service Oil Company v. Merritt	332 P.2d 677	42
1917	Flesner v. Cooper	162 P. 1112	42
1920	Willis v. State Industrial Commission	190 P. 92	41
1963	Pepsi-Cola Bottling Co. of Tulsa, Okl. v. Von Brady	386 P.2d 993	39
1953	Howell v. Rushing	261 P.2d 217	39

Showing the 15 most-cited of 729 authored opinions in our data. “Cited” is inbound citations across the CourtListener corpus. Case links open the ruling’s full text (CourtListener) or its page here; read the methodology and verify against the primary source.

Questions & answers

How do judges of the Supreme Court of Oklahoma reach the bench?: The court's current selection method is merit selection with retention.
Which court was Napoleon Bonaparte Johnson on?: Napoleon Bonaparte Johnson was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Oklahoma.

Sources

Each fact on this page traces to a primary public record.

How we source & reconcile data → Data & Sources

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18 years on the Supreme Court of Oklahoma. Data as of 2026-03-31. Informational only; verify against the primary source before relying. Not a consumer report (FCRA).